Classical music is taking over the world

In China, one factory makes a piano a minute to keep up with demand created by 40 million children studying to play — the expanding middle class throughout Asia is fuelling an insatiable appetite for the orchestra, says Petroc Trelawny

Krug champagne flowed freely at the Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestra’s 40th anniversary gala last month, accompanied by caviar canapés and chocolates dusted with gold leaf. Some of the richest people in the territory had turned out to hear Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky playing Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. I was making small talk with a man from Christie’s, who suddenly stopped mid-sentence as one of the orchestra’s patrons passed by. “I’m pretty sure we sold her that necklace,” he said, as we eyed the lavish jewels. “But I’m not going to tell you the price.”

When the Hong Kong Philharmonic went from being a ragtag band of amateur musicians to a fully professional orchestra, it quickly became one of the most important ensembles in all Asia. In 1974, China’s Cultural Revolution had not finished. Over the previous decade Chairman Mao’s ambitions to wipe out what he saw as the foreign bourgeois elements corrupting society had hit music particularly hard. The few orchestras that had survived were forced to play from a small canon of works chosen by the state, including a series of “revolutionary operas” and approved pieces such as The Yellow River Piano Concerto.

Thanks to its rich patrons and generous government support, Hong Kong’s orchestra faces a secure future. But it also has competition these days. Cultural Revolution now forgotten (Chinese arts administrators prefer you not to mention it) and with a rapidly expanding middle class, China has taken to classical music with alacrity. The oft-quoted statistic that 40 million Chinese children are studying the piano is considered by many to be a spectacular underestimate. Commercial piano schools in major cities teach from six in the morning until midnight in order to accommodate all those who want lessons; Russian musicians are hired in order to make up a national shortfall of teachers. Nearly 100 factories produce instruments on fast-moving production lines; in the southern city of Guangzhou I visited a plant making a piano every minute.

This new-found love of music encompasses orchestras too. More than a dozen professional ensembles have launched, or relaunched, in the past few decades. The finest of them is the Beijing based China Philharmonic — which spearheads a season of visiting Asian orchestras at this summer’s BBC Proms. It will perform music by Elgar and Tchaikovsky alongside a new work, Joie éternelle by Shanghainese composer Qigang Chen. The orchestra is relatively new, founded in 2000 by Long Yu, a man best described as China’s equivalent of Valery Gergiev, the Russian maestro and Vladimir Putin confidant who leads the London Symphony Orchestra. An astute political networker, Long Yu has China’s cultural commissars on speed-dial, and controls all three of the nation’s top orchestras — he is music director of the Shanghai and Guangzhou Symphony Orchestras as well as the China Philharmonic.

They enjoy lavish state funding, officially as high as 60 per cent, though in reality even higher, with local governments donating state-of-the-art halls and rehearsal spaces and guaranteeing the purchase of major allocations of tickets for each concert. The foyer of the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra’s home, with rehearsal facilities its British counterparts can only dream of, is lined with pictures of past performances at the Musikverein in Vienna, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall in New York. Touring abroad is a key to China’s orchestras; the message they project internationally, of a culturally vibrant nation, with tastes not so different to those of the West, is central to Chinese diplomacy.

Passion for sound: China has taken to classical music with alacrity

It’s not just China where orchestras are coming of age. Pianist Stephen Hough remembers making his debut with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra 30 years ago. “Back then the idea that they would get invited to the Proms was unthinkable,” he recalls. “They were in no way an international orchestra.”

Hough has made regular visits to play in Singapore in the past decade and notes a new confidence. “It makes me feel that we’ve become jaded in the West,” he says. “In Asia there are so many young musicians that it feels like a participation sport — and classical music works particularly well because it’s a language that needs no translator.”

While the old European masterworks are undeniable popular with new Asian audiences, there is also a hunger for works that mix indigenous Chinese sounds with Western composing techniques — such as Zhou Long’s Postures, which the Singapore Symphony will play at the Albert Hall. The Seoul Philharmonic will bring a Korean instrument to its Prom — the sheng, a reed mouth organ, for which distinguished Seoul-born, Berlin-based composer Unsuk Chin has written a concerto, Šu. Founded in 1948, the orchestra’s debut Prom has been a long time coming. Conductor Myung-Whun Chung made his first appearance with the Seoul Philharmonic as a seven-year-old pianist; half a century later he is credited with dramatically raising performance standards as music director.

The Middle East is perhaps the least likely region to support a flowering of orchestras. The Qatar Philharmonic launched in 2007, when the Gulf city-state decided an orchestra was essential to its plans to become the culture hub of the region. The former boss of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra was hired, with the instruction to “create an orchestra of international standard as quickly as possible”.

While the vast majority of the players are European, and the music director, Han-Na Chang, is South Korean, the Qatar Philharmonic is proud of the fact that it already has more than 30 specially commissioned works from Arab composers in its repertoire.

Establishing Western orchestras was a key part of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s cultural revolution in Turkey in the 1920s, when ensembles were founded in all major cities. Today, according to Serhan Bali, editor of Istanbul-based classical music magazine Andante, the quality is pretty patchy: “They are all bound to the government,” he says, “and are not in very good shape either artistically or in terms of how they are run.”

The great hope for the future of classical music in Turkey is the Borusan Istanbul Philharmonic, an orchestra completely funded by Borusan Holdings, one of the richest industrial conglomerates in the country. “It’s a bit like the Lucerne Festival Orchestra,” says Bali, “taking the best players from the state orchestras and giving them a chance to properly show their talent.”

The Borusan Philharmonic plays a dozen concerts a season in Istanbul. “Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP party has little interest in Western art,” says Bali. “Major cultural initiatives only happen here thanks to the passion of the middle classes and a few dynamic private sponsors.”

It’s clear there is a cultural shift in the global orchestra business. While government subsidy has safeguarded the great European ensembles, in the US the collapse of the “philanthropic dollar” has orchestras under more pressure than ever before, with international touring becoming increasingly rare, leaving the door open for the orchestras of Asia.

The four Chinese orchestras I have heard have excellent string sections but are less secure when it comes to wind and brass, a legacy of the way music has been taught in the country’s conservatoires; the Qatar Philharmonic may feel like a European orchestra transported to the Persian Gulf. But compared with the great orchestras of the West these are young institutions that need time to mature. In the Seventies a sniffy sommelier might have raised an eyebrow at the suggestion of a wine from Australia or New Zealand. Let’s not make that mistake again; new world orchestras are here to stay.